Search Results for: blog remember to play

Why Your Pre-Teen Quit Playing Sports

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One way to encourage your child to get a healthy amount of exercise is to make it fun. Sports offer kids the ability to exercise while having fun, the chance to learn how to play as a team, and a good way to develop athletic skills. Despite these benefits, 70% of kids quit sports by the age of 13. Here are some reasons why that happens. It stopped being fun. Have you ever watched kindergartners play soccer against another team of kindergarteners? What happens is both adorable and amusing. They sit down when they get tired, and start playing with … Continue reading →

Cleaning Or Playing, Decisions, Decisions

No one wants to live in an overwhelmingly messy house. For me, it’s stressful if the house is a mess. It’s also stressful to always be nagging my daughter about picking up after herself. I did feel it was my job to teach her to clean up after herself, I just never enjoyed that particular battle. When Hailey was small I had to accept that my house was going to have that lived in look. There are just not enough hours in the day to do everything. One lesson I learned early in my single parenthood was to pick my … Continue reading →

A Foray Into Sensory Play

As you may know, I love to read about all things related to parenting. Sometimes that is a good thing, and other times it just gets me into trouble. Yesterday, I was reading about how important it is for children to engage in “sensory play” or “messy play”. When I started reading about bags and boxes filled with fun things to squish, pour, sort, and explore I became worried. Was everyone else out there already doing this with their toddlers? Have I been depriving Dylan of something important for months or years? Why hadn’t I thought to do anything like … Continue reading →

Birthday Parties to Remember

The countdown to my daughter’s birthday party is on. However, unlike in years past when she decided on a theme for her shindig two weeks after Christmas, this time around the jury is still out. With time ticking I came up with a list of potential themes that I could probably pull off without enlisting Martha Stewart or Colin Cowie’s help. Here are just some of the fun, fun, fun suggestions my daughter will be choosing from: Bugs: My mom is a ladybug fanatic and has all kinds of decorations we could use for the party. Granted, my daughter is … Continue reading →

Playing it Safe During Spring Break

This morning the Today show ran a piece on college co-eds prepping to go crazy on Spring Break in Cancun, Mexico. The report focused on an American student who was brutally attacked while he lounged poolside at his Mexican hotel. Basically, it raised the issue of spring break, foreign travel and safety. Personally, Mexico is not exactly at the top of my family’s spring break destination list. You know, drug cartels and all. Of course, if you are not careful you can get hurt visiting your local children’s museum, though I doubt the injuries would be caused by masked men … Continue reading →

Remembering the Boy in the Bubble

David Vetter was also known as the “Bubble Boy”. He was born with severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID), and had to spend his short life living in a sterile, plastic, “bubble”. There have been improvements in treatment for SCID since then. David Vetter was born in 1971 with a disease called severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID). This is a rare, hereditary disease, (that is actually a group of different diseases). According to the National Human Genome Research Institute, there are only 40 to 100 babies in the United States diagnosed with SCID each year. It is caused by a genetic mutation. The … Continue reading →

Playing With Food

(Want fries with that?) Santa brought this McDonald’s Drive-Thru playset to my daughter a couple of Christmases ago. So now, whenever I get a hankering for Ronald’s fries, all I have to do is belly up to the plastic window and yell for the short order cook. Or, in my case, the short cook. The interactive toy has yielded hours of fun for our family, and while my daughter is still nearly a decade away from officially working under the real Golden Arches, the kid can flip a burger and swirl a McFlurry better some of Mickey D’s paid employees. … Continue reading →

Remember the Plan

The other week playing tennis, my partner and I were down 3 games to 1. ’Okay, let’s get it back to 3 all for starters,’ I said and she agreed. Then after we won the next game, we both said ‘remember the plan.’ One game was a particularly long drawn out game that went to a number of deuces, about twenty in all. We kept hanging in there telling each other, ‘remember the plan, remember the plan,’ repeating it like a mantra. It occurred to me then, that it’s not a bad analogy for marriage – to remember the plan. … Continue reading →

My Last Blog

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This is going to be my last blog as the Adoption Blogger for Families.com. I’m looking forward to spending the summer with my kids, possibly working at their school, and taking on new writing projects. I may well guest blog occasionally for this or other Families blogs. It seems the Adoption Blog will continue, so I hope this blog, along with Families’ forums, can be a source of information and community for adoptive parents, adoptees, and birth parents. Yesterday I could think of a million things to say in my last few blogs and wondered how I would fit it … Continue reading →

Places to Play

The temperature has consistently been over 90 degrees in our area of North Texas for weeks. It’s not even mid-June yet and we’re sweltering. I love the heat, but it’s not the best to be out in for long periods of time. I’ve written about how our lack of a fence limits how Jessie can play outside. This leaves me looking for safe places where Jessie can play. I took Jessie to the park in the middle of our small town. We didn’t stay long because the play equipment was geared toward older children instead of toddlers. This was very … Continue reading →